Something as Insipid
by HardfacedQueenofMisadventure
Summary: Sometimes, it's really hard not to care when your estranged boyfriend goes missing. Sorta one-sided Neo/OC, pre-Matrix, rated T for references and some bad language.


**Well, here we are again with another experimental fic. I'm pretty confident about this one (for once), and I feel like I've put in a lot of effort, and I hope that shows. I shall say no more, so... enjoy!**

* * *

_Erin stared bleakly at the newspaper in her hands, and tried to force herself not to care. Really, she shouldn't give a damn. They'd never had anything special, anything real. Not that she hadn't tried. She'd wanted to hate him, at first, hate him for his distance, his apparent indifference towards her. But somehow she couldn't. He was strange, withdrawn, potentially utterly insane… and yet she was drawn to him. They'd met over a misunderstanding regarding a bill at the noodle bar: her boss had told her to kick him out, and she'd most certainly obeyed… but not without slipping him what he'd ordered, to-go, and on the house. Yes, it had come out of her paycheck, yes, she'd almost lost her job, but it was worth it.  
That should have been the beginning of it, really. She'd ended up sleeping over at his place many times after that, and whilst it occasionally led to slightly more exciting things, he never seemed bothered. Sex never seemed too high up on his list of priorities; it was clear it was something he only engaged in to make her happy. _

_She curled tighter into herself against the arm of the sofa, reading more closely. This was a mistake, it had to be. Things like this didn't happen to ordinary people. People like him didn't make the daily news, ever. The photograph was grainy, out of focus, but undeniably him. She'd seen him enough times to commit that face to memory. Those eyes, simultaneously distant and focused, inwardly fixated upon something she had no hope of understanding.  
Sighing shakily, Erin took another deep gulp of tepid black coffee, and squinted once more at the caption, as if it had any chance of changing. _

_**Missing: Thomas A. Anderson.  
**_

* * *

Some nights, Erin could almost convince herself that they stood a chance of being happy together. In the warm tranquillity of their shared afterglow, they'd lay together, silent and spent, until one or both surrendered to sleep. No words would cheapen the moment, and Erin could almost fool herself into thinking that these things would work out.

This was **not **one of those nights.

She lay awake, cold and uneasy, listening to Thomas muttering insensibly beside her, trying and failing to decipher individual words. He moved restlessly, occasionally striking out at things that he alone could see, his breathing rapid and arrhythmic. She'd worry, if this hadn't happened so many times before. Instead, she sighed and closed her eyes stubbornly, determined to simply wait it out. The room was freezing; the heating had been broken for a while now. He'd done nothing about it. Maybe he couldn't afford to get it fixed, though considering the amount of techno-junk that arrived at the flat on a regular basis, money was not an issue. Maybe he'd simply forgotten; he'd seemed pretty spaced-out lately.  
Or maybe…  
Maybe he just hadn't been aware of the cold.

He still hadn't stopped shaking and whispering, his expression flitting between troubled and pained. Erin wondered if she should try to wake him. Wasn't that dangerous? No, that was just sleepwalking, right?  
She laid a hand against his shoulder gently, experimentally.

"Thomas? Baby, wake up," she murmured. His ragged black t-shirt was damp with perspiration in spite of the chill in the air. Okay, that's unnatural. Maybe I should…  
As if sensing her unease, Thomas jerked upright with a hoarse cry, breathing hard.

**Thomas peered around the room through eyes blurred with sleep. Green, endlessly flowing and shifting green, dominated his vision, falling down around him like rain. A dissonant, electric-sounding hum drove into his head, and it was suddenly impossible to breathe. The air was so hot and close; he felt trapped, encapsulated. He was vaguely aware of a presence beside him, but he could barely make out who it was through the glowing green pulsing around him.  
The taste of metal seeped onto his tongue, and he swallowed it back. His eyes were burning, he couldn't breathe, couldn't move…  
Someone's hand, cold and soft, closed startlingly around his arm, and he recoiled, but in that moment his strange trance was broken. No green light, no humming, just his crappy, run-down apartment. The claustrophobic heat lingered, however, along with it the driving need to escape, to run…!**

"Whoa!" Instinct held her back from touching him again, but she inched a little closer. "You okay?" He nodded vaguely, but there was a look in his eyes that she didn't like at all.

"It's just…" His voice was scarcely a whisper; she had to lean in close to catch what he was saying. "…so _hot _in here." Erin chuckled darkly.

"Are you insane? It's freezing, see?" She gave him her hands – practically numb from the cold – to prove it. He gripped them gratefully, and she moved to lightly cup his face, watching as his eyes closed for a moment.

"So hot…" he repeated to himself, his breathing picking up speed. "_Green…" _His voice had a dreamy, trancelike note, as though he were barely aware of the words even as he spoke them. Before she could say anything to him, however, he pulled away from her with an incoherent cry.

"Tom?"

"Just gotta… get some _air!" _Gripped with sudden, inexplicable panic, he bolted from the room, somehow managing not to trip over the myriad wires crisscrossing the grimy floorboards. Erin was on her feet almost immediately, following him with only a brief thought spared for the fact that she wasn't dressed.

Things seemed to reach a peak once they made it to the fire escape. Thomas fell to his knees on the cold iron stairs, hyperventilating. She knelt beside him hesitantly, completely at a loss for what to do but grateful that nobody had come out to see what was going on. This would probably be somewhat difficult to explain. She laid a cold hand against his back, murmuring vague words of comfort, feeling more than a little self-conscious in her mismatched bra and panties.

"Sshh…" she breathed. "You're okay, you're okay. Just breathe…" Eventually his breathing slowed and the tension fled his body. By this point Erin had started to shiver, and all she really wanted was to go back inside and hope that the bedsheets hadn't lost all of their warmth yet. But Thomas stayed where he was, head hanging low between prominent shoulderblades. She rested her hand against the pale, exposed back of his neck, feeling the perspiration lightly beading there. He jumped at the contact, glancing up at her.

"Feeling better?" she asked, her voice shattering the tense silence like a stone thrown into a frozen pond. _Frozen _being the operative word. He nodded vaguely, still somewhat breathless.

"Still hot?" she asked, her voice laced with a light edge of sarcasm, blowing on her fingers to illustrate the point. He shrugged.

"A little." Frowning, Erin touched the back of her hand against his forehead.

"You feel okay." True enough, he felt warm, but relatively normal otherwise. He smiled faintly, brushing her fingers away.

"It's not… I'm fine. Really."

"Really?" She raised her eyebrows at him. _Why am I finding this so hard to believe?_

"Yeah… I just need to… get to the computer." Erin scoffed, folding her arms.

"Fuckin' typical." He shrugged, and she held out a hand to pull him to his feet.

* * *

Erin watched, transfixed, as his long fingers tripped effortlessly across the grimy white keyboard, typing almost faster than her eyes could follow. He'd once again slipped into an almost trancelike state, focusing on nothing but the screen in front of him, barely even responding when she spoke. She squinted at the screen from where she sat on the corner of the bed, reading what he typed:

…_hard to describe, it was like I was paralyzed or something. The air became very hot, and it was hard to breathe. And for a moment it was like I was seeing in…code. Endless lines of green symbols falling down around me, and there was this strange sound, a kind of a humming, but it only lasted a few seconds… _

As he typed he muttered to himself, sentences that she only half-caught. None of it made much sense to her, anyway. She hopped down from the bed and walked over to his desk, touching his shoulder; he didn't so much as flinch. She'd seen this before: the Invisible Wall. Once he started typing, or coding, or anything to do with that computer, he went straight into a world of his own and nothing could drag him out of it. Once she'd sat there singing for two hours straight and he hadn't said a word. _Well, not tonight, mister. _

"What's this?" she asked, gesturing to the screen. "A dream?" He looked at her for a moment, an unreadable expression in his dark eyes.

"Nothing."

"C'mon, tell me. All this stuff about _falling code… _It sounds like something out of a cyberpunk novel. C'mon, _spill." _She ran her fingertips up and down the side of his neck, trying to distract him, but he simply pushed her away and went back to typing. Undeterred, she stayed where she was, eyes still fixated on the screen, peering at the title of the message board.

"Huh… '_What is the Matrix?' _Well, what _is_ it? This some kind of…hacker forum or something?" She mock-gasped then, pressing her hand to her mouth. "Oh my… is this _illegal? _Is that why you can't tell me? You're not… breaking the law, are you?" She dropped melodramatically to her knees by his feet, throwing herself across his lap in false anguish. "Oh, I'm dating a criminal, my mother will never forgive me…!" He shoved her then, hard, and she overbalanced, falling backwards to hit the floor.

"Erin!" he snapped, turning to look at her for just a moment. "Just… shut up a second, will you? This is important." She huffed, crossing her arms.

"So important that you can't tell me what it is?" He paused, sighed and shook his head.

"You could never… You wouldn't understand, okay?" And, just like that, before she could even think of a snappy retort, the Invisible Wall was back. Once his eyes hit that screen, it was like she ceased to exist. Nothing she said or did that night would be enough to get his attention. _Fine. _She slipped quietly away from him, located her clothes and shoes and quickly dressed.

"I'm leaving, Thomas," she said, slightly louder than was necessary. Nothing. Not even a flicker of acknowledgement. _Case in point. _With a sigh, she stalked over to the door and yanked it open. She looked back, and he was still typing avidly.

"I guess I'll see you around?" No response; he didn't even look up.

"Okay. Bye." She walked out into the dimly-lit hall, this time not even risking a glance over her shoulder, and slammed the door behind her.  
_Fuck you, Thomas Anderson.  
_

* * *

_A fortnight after that, he was reported missing. And though Erin tried and tried to tell herself that she didn't care, that he was nothing to her since she was clearly nothing to him, there was no denying it, no escaping it. In spite of his strange ways and his almost-cold attitude, in spite of everything…_

"_Damn it, Thomas," she whispered shakily to the newspaper. "Damn it, I was fucking _in love_ with you!"_

* * *

**Well, that was definitely fun to write, so I hope you had fun reading it! I might actually revisit Erin at another time, so keep your eyes open. Reviews or feedback of any kind would be wonderful, and, as always, if you have any prompts, ideas or requests, please let me know, either in a review or a PM! Thanks for your time! :)**


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